The Yard

El Fraile. Spring, 2041.

The road down to El Fraile got drier with every kilometer. Stef had grown up knowing this fact and could not, even now, fully accept it: that you could leave Querencia in fog and arrive on the south coast in the kind of dry pale sunlight that suggested the island was actually two islands sharing an address. The laurisilva did not exist in El Fraile. The laurisilva would die in El Fraile.

He took the last switchback in second gear. The Santana Land Rover pickup, sixty-three years old, biodiesel, hand-cranked when the starter was being a bastard, made the noise it made when it was happy. He had taken the gravel out of the air filter twelve months ago and it had not gone back in.

The yard was on the south edge of the village, at a place where two of the old hotel-strip's access roads met and gave up. The fence was a kilometer of mismatched chain-link salvaged in the same way as everything else inside it. The gate had been a billboard once. Stef pulled up at the gate and tapped the horn twice, which was the agreed signal, and waited.

There was no immediate response.

Stef waited.

It was a quality he had.

After about a minute, a small woman in paint-spattered gray overalls appeared from behind a stack of Trinitron monitors and shaded her eyes and squinted at the gate and then said, in her usual Munich-by-way-of-Burning-Man voice:

"Stef, you absolute lieber Schatz, give me thirty seconds."

"Take a minute," Stef called back. "The truck is comfortable."

"I have coffee," Gertrude said, as a threat. "I have coffee from Margarethe."

"Take half a minute, then."

She vanished.

Stef sat in the truck. The engine ticked, cooling. From somewhere behind the central yard came the consistent small flare of someone using a torch on something, and a Spanish voice saying vale, vale, otra vez, without irritation. From somewhere closer came what Stef thought was either a goat or a small child making an extended complaint about a thing. He could not tell, from this distance, which.

He looked at the side of the nearest container.

Painted on it, large enough to be visible from the road, was Maisie Ardilla

Maisie Ardilla was holding a magnifying glass over a footprint in the sand. The footprint was clearly that of a goat. Maisie Ardilla's expression was one of professional concentration tinged with personal disappointment. Above her, in white spray-paint capitals, Gertrude had written:

The mural was new since Stef's last visit, six weeks ago. Stef looked at it for a long time and then he made the small face he made when he found something genuinely funny, which involved no muscle movement his sons would have recognized but which Godelieve had known since 2009.

The gate creaked.

Gertrude was holding two enamel mugs and walking very fast.

"Drink. Walk. We have a Wahnsinn morning, Stef, Wahnsinn. Two boxes. Two boxes from the Splendora Royale, Tomás brought them in yesterday afternoon, no quiero hablar de the second box because I will weep, also the first box. Coffee."

He took the mug.

It was Margarethe's espresso, ground beans sent down on the Guagua, brewed by Gertrude in the El Fraile pour-over way, strong, slightly ashy, exactly correct.

"From Linnea's plantation?"

"Not yet, you fool. Not yet. Six more weeks. Drink the imitation. Come, come."

She walked. He walked.

The scrapyard at El Fraile was organized the way a brain is organized, which is to say not visibly but rigorously. Gertrude had been running the electronics for six years. She had categories that no other person on the island could fully reconstruct: will boot, might boot, physical media intact / format unknown, worth the silver, worth the copper, worth nothing but Anna might want it. The last category was always the largest pile. Stef walked through it without particular concern.

She led him to her shed, which was the cleanest building on the property by a margin so wide it functioned as a moral statement. Inside, the air was dry. Two banker's boxes sat on a long bench, under a hand-lettered sign that said FOR STEF with a small painted squirrel beside it.

"Box one," said Gertrude.

She lifted the lid.

Inside were CDs, in their original cases, in alphabetical order. Stef counted at a glance: maybe two hundred. Spanish names, English names, German names. Bach. Björk. Cesária Évora. Daft Punk. The cases were dusty but intact. A few of them had the small white sticker of a Madrid record shop that had closed some time around 2015.

"From the Splendora?"

"From a storage unit behind the Splendora. The unit had been padlocked for, I think, fifteen years. Tomás found the owner in the registry. The owner has not been seen since 2027." She did the small face that meant she was acknowledging one of the small unfinished things of the world without dwelling on it. "I will not weep. The other box."

She lifted the second lid.

Inside, in foam, was a single object: a 2.5-inch external hard drive, slightly scratched, USB-A cable still attached, in a black aluminum enclosure. A small handwritten label on the top said, in faded biro:

Stef set down his coffee.

"Boots?"

"I have not tried it, Stef. I have not tried it. That is for Anna. I will not be the one who finds out the bearings are seized. You take it up. You take it up carefully."

"It's a hard drive, not an egg."

"It is somebody's family, Stef."

He looked at her.

"It is somebody's family," she said again, slower, in her best impression of him.

"That's mine."

"I know. I am taking it back."

He smiled, in his almost-invisible way. He put the lid back on the second box, and on the first, and he carried them both out to the truck. He set them on the bed. He came back for the empty enamel mug.

Gertrude was at the door of the shed, leaning, watching.

"How is she?"

She did not have to specify which she.

"She's on the root beer," Stef said. "Forty-seven."

"Forty-seven. The first time I taste the forty-seventh batch it had better be at her kitchen table."

"It will be."

"You tell her."

"I will tell her."

"And tell her there is a song on a drive I sent up before, that I want to hear about."

Stef nodded. The aya-yait was, as far as he understood it, the song Maddy had been working on for a few weeks. Anna had played him part of it once, briefly, without explaining what it was. He had recognized the form even though he did not have the word for it; Pipaluk had once sung something similar at a verbena in 2032, and he had not forgotten it.

"She'll tell you tonight on the mesh."

"Sehr gut. Now go. The Guagua is coming through at eleven and I do not want to be here for the proselytizers."

"Vigilant Prophets?"

"They got the Guagua schedule from somebody. Idioten. Last week one of them tried to give Tomás a pamphlet, and Tomás is sixty-two and was a metalsmith for forty years and explained to him in the kindest possible way that the apocalypse had already happened and his pamphlet was, with respect, fifteen years late."

"Tomás is a national treasure."

"Tomás is my treasure. Drive carefully. Tell Anna I love her. Tell Saga her Tía says she had better come down to La Caleta for the next puppet show, because Maisie Ardilla has a new villain and the new villain is un acapallo, which I am told is the term."

"Acapallo?"

"It means a person who is annoying in a specific way that they do not realize they are being annoying. Saga taught me. Saga also told me I am using it wrong."

"Saga is correct."

"Saga is thirteen."

"Both."

He got into the truck.

He hand-cranked it on the third try.

He pulled out of the gate and turned north.

In the side mirror, Maisie Ardilla watched him go from the side of the container. The witness was unhelpful. The detective continued her work.